A Reagan-era district court judge rules that the Care Act is within the bounds of congressional power, but will the Supreme Court take his position when it hears the case?

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The closer we all get to a Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act, the less important all the latest lower federal court rulings seem -- and the less media coverage they receive. That's a pity, now especially, because Tuesday's decision by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the constitutionality of Obama's health-care law by a 2-1 vote, is a big deal for many different reasons. And had the ruling been issued, say, four months ago, it's probably all anyone who cares about health care would be talking about right now.

Not today, though. Now the hearts and minds and eyes of Obamacaristas everywhere are focused solely upon the Supreme Court, and its docketing calendar, which any day now may disclose to the world that the health-care law is scheduled to be discussed at oral argument sometime early next year. With the showdown almost at hand, and right in time for the 2012 presidential campaign, the federal appeals court rulings that are straggling in have the feel of late arrivals to a party who are having a hard time finding a seat.

Which brings us to Seven-sky v. Holder, a lengthy but accessible opinion in which D.C. Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, held that the Care Act was a constitutional exercise of Congressional authority. Silberman's endorsement of the federal law is a huge political boon to the White House and supporters of the new measure because for decades he has been a Rushmorian face of conservative jurisprudence in the nation's capital. It will be fascinating to see whether and to what extent conservative critics of the ruling go after Silberman. If they do, it would be like eating one of their own.

The second significant part of the ruling is the language Judge Silberman used in rejecting the arguments made by opponents of the Care Act. This was no meandering thesis like we've seen before in this fight. Instead, it was a pragmatic acknowledgement of the reality of the impact health care has on human beings. For example, of the law, Judge Silberman wrote:

It certainly is an encroachment on individual liberty, but it is no more so than a command that restaurants or hotels are obliged to serve all customers regardless of race, that gravely ill individuals cannot use a substance their doctors described as the only effective palliative for excruciating pain, or that a farmer cannot grow enough wheat to support his own family.

Judge Silberman also hammered away at whatever is left of the legitimacy of the "action/inaction" dichotomy, which opponents of the health care law have raised in arguing that the law goes well beyond Congressional authority under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. He wrote:

Appellants say that Congress cannot regulate based on such sweeping generalizations. Only individuals who are voluntarily engaging in an "activity" related to interstate commerce -- not the uninsured, who are "inactive" -- are within the scope of the Commerce Clause. The mandate, it should be recognized, is indeed somewhat novel, but so too, for all its elegance, is appellants' argument. No Supreme Court case has ever held or implied that Congress's Commerce Clause authority is limited to individuals who are presently engaging in an activity involving, or substantially affecting, interstate commerce.

The third significant part of the Tuesday's ruling is that D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh, an appointee of President George W. Bush, dissented from Judge Silberman's ruling only to the extent of concluding that the court had no jurisdiction to hear the merits of the case at this time. Judge Kavanaugh worked with Kenneth Starr during the Lewinsky investigation and was later implicated in the scandal involving the Bush-era torture memos. That he would be unwilling to take the opportunity to lend succor to the forces arrayed against the Care Act is interesting and perhaps even a bit revealing.

All of that said, the truth is that the justices now are free to heed or ignore all of the advice they have received to date from the dozens of lower-court judges who have scoured the language of the Care Act. That's why being an intermediate appeals court judge is such a drag. But Judge Silberman's ruling, especially, is a fairly good barometer of how the judiciary has reacted to the law. It doesn't guarantee any result, of course. But it ought to make the law's supporters feel a bit of momentum and a boost of energy now that the finish line is finally in sight.

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The special counsel indicted the Russian nationals and three Russian entities for allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election, the Department of Justice announced Friday.

On Friday, February 16, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosentein announced that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, had indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities on charges that including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft. This is the full text of that indictment.

Students have mourned and rallied the public after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High that left 17 dead.

Something was different about the mass shooting this week in Parkland, Florida, in which 14 students and three adults were killed.

It was not only the death toll. The mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High became the deadliest high-school shooting in American history (edging out Columbine, which killed 13 in 1999).

What made Parkland different were the people who stepped forward to describe it. High-school students—the survivors of the calamity themselves—became the voice of the tragedy. Tweets that were widely reported as coming from the students expressed grief for the victims, pushed against false reports, and demanded accountability.

The company’s unusual offer—to give employees up to $5,000 for leaving—may actually be a way to get them to stay longer.

On Monday, Amazon reportedly began a series of rare layoffs at its headquarters in Seattle, cutting several hundred corporate employees. But this week, something quite different is happening at the company’s warehouses and customer-service centers across the country: Amazon will politely ask its “associates”—full-time and part-time hourly employees—if they’d prefer to quit. And if they do, Amazon will pay them as much as $5,000 for walking out the door.

Officially called “The Offer,” this proposition is, according to Amazon, a way to encourage unhappy employees to move on. “We believe staying somewhere you don’t want to be isn’t healthy for our employees or for the company,” Ashley Robinson, an Amazon spokesperson, wrote to me in an email. The amount full-time employees get offered ranges from $2,000 to $5,000, and depends on how long they have been at the company; if they take the money, they agree to never work for Amazon again. (The idea for all this originated at Zappos, the online shoe retailer that Amazon bought in 2009.)

Outrage mobs are chipping away at democracy, one meaningless debate at a time.

The mob was unusually vociferous, even for Twitter. After the California-born ice skater Mirai Nagasu became the first American woman to land a triple axel at the Olympics, the New York Times writer Bari Weiss commented “Immigrants: They get the job done.”

What followed that innocuous tweet was one of the sillier, manufactured controversies I have ever seen on Twitter. Twitter’s socially conscious denizens probably only realized they should be outraged at Weiss after they saw other people being outraged, as is so often the case. Outside of Twitter, some of Weiss’s Times colleagues were also offended by the tweet—and even hurt by it. The critics’objection was that Nagasu isn’t herself an immigrant, but rather the child of immigrants, and so calling her one was an example of “perpetual othering.”

The clear goal of the special counsel is to speak to the American public about the seriousness of Russian interference.

With yet another blockbuster indictment (why is it always on a Friday afternoon?), Special Counsel Robert Mueller has, once again, upended Washington. And this time, it is possible that his efforts may have a wider effect outside the Beltway.

For those following the matter, there has been little doubt that Russian citizens attempted to interfere with the American presidential election. The American intelligence agencies publicized that conclusion more than a year ago in a report issued in January 2017, and it has stood by the analysis whenever it has been questioned. But some in the country have doubted the assertion—asking for evidence of interference that was not forthcoming.

Now the evidence has been laid out in painful detail by the special counsel. If any significant fraction of what is alleged in the latest indictment is true (and we should, of course, remind ourselves that an indictment is just an allegation—not proof), then this tale is a stunning condemnation of Russian activity. A Russian organization with hundreds of employees and a budget of millions of dollars is said to have systematically engaged in an effort (code named “Project Lakhta”) to undermine the integrity of the election and, perhaps more importantly, to have attempted to influence the election to benefit then-candidate Donald Trump. Among the allegations, the Russians:

Leggings and yoga gear are common sights at practice rinks. But in competition, gender-coded costumes still prevail.

Last weekend, one of the buzzier stories out of the Olympic ladies’ figure skating short program competition was one you might call … surprisingly surprising. The French figure skater Maé-Bérénice Méité made headlines: for the fact that she skated to a Beyoncé medley, and even more so, for the fact that she did it in pants.

More accurately, she did it in a bedazzled black unitard, but that didn’t stop news outlets and viewers on Twitter from pointing out Méité’s eye-catching, subtly subversive pants. “This French figure skater may not have won a medal, but her pants took people's choice,” raved Yahoo! News, and AOL named Méité’s bodysuit to its list of “most dazzling figure skating outfits” of these Olympic Games.

Tech analysts are prone to predicting utopia or dystopia. They’re worse at imagining the side effects of a firm's success.

The U.S economy is in the midst of a wrenching technological transformation that is fundamentally changing the way people sleep, work, eat, shop, love, read, and interact.

At least, that’s one interpretation.

A second story of this age of technological transformation says that it’s mostly a facade—that the last 30 years have been a productivity bust and little has changed in everyday life, aside from the way everyone reads and watches videos. People wanted flying cars and got Netflix binges instead.

Let’s call these the Disrupt Story and the Dud Story of technology. When a new company, app, or platform emerges, it’s common for analysts to divide into camps—Disrupt vs. Dud—with some yelping that the new thing will change everything and others yawning with the expectation that traditionalism will win out.

Like it or not, the middle class became global citizens through consumerism—and they did so at the mall.

“Okay, we’ll see you in two-and-a-half hours,” the clerk tells me, taking the iPhone from my hand. I’m at the Apple Store, availing myself of a cheap smartphone battery replacement, an offer the company made after taking heat for deliberately slowing down devices. A test run by a young woman typing at a feverish, unnatural pace on an iPad confirms that mine desperately needed the swap. As she typed, I panicked. What will I do in the mall for so long, and without a phone? How far the mall has fallen that I rack my brain for something to do here.

The Apple Store captures everything I don’t like about today’s mall. A trip here is never easy—the place is packed and chaotic, even on weekdays. It runs by its own private logic, cashier and help desks replaced by roving youths in seasonally changing, colored T-shirts holding iPads, directing traffic.

In February 2011, Swiss citizens voted in a referendum that called for a national gun registry and for firearms owned by members of the military to be stored in public arsenals.

“It is a question of trust between the state and the citizen. The citizen is not just a citizen, he is also a soldier,” Hermann Suter, who at the time was vice president of the Swiss gun-rights group Pro Tell, told the BBC then. “The gun at home is the best way to avoid dictatorships—only dictators take arms away from the citizens.”

Apparently many of his fellow Swiss agreed. The referendum was easily defeated. Gun ownership in the countryhas deep historic roots and it is tied to mandatory military service for Swiss men between the ages of 18 and 34. Traditionally, soldiers were allowed to keep their weapons at home in order to defend against conquering armies. These fears came close to being realized during the Franco-Prussian War on 1871; as well as World War I, when the Swiss border was threatened; and World War II, when the country feared a Nazi invasion.

The shrugs that have met credible recent allegations of affairs by Donald Trump force a reconsideration of the post-Bill Clinton narrative about voter morality and politicians’ sense of shame.

Right up until 2016 or so, there was a clean narrative about political infidelity. Back in the day, the story went, politicians had affairs with abandon—John Kennedy, of course, but also Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and plenty others. (It’s a curiosity that Richard Nixon, the most famously unethical president, is one of the few without serious allegations of infidelity.)

The voters would have been appalled, of course, but the press discreetly ignored these infidelities, for whatever reasons—prudishness, excessive closeness to sources, whatever. When Jimmy Carter copped to having “committed adultery in my heart many times,” it was laughable, but not that that far beyond the puritanical mores of American society. Perhaps the press was wise to look away from mistresses to the presidents.